


Cold and Intimate

by threewalls



Category: KAT-TUN (Band), LOVECRAFT H. P. - Works
Genre: Alternate Universe - Horror, Blood, Canon What Canon, Community: bloodyvalentine, Community: kink_bingo, Community: trope_bingo, Cults, Drowning, Gothic, Guro, Knives, Lovecraftian, M/M, Other, Tentacles, Xeno
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-31
Updated: 2013-03-31
Packaged: 2017-12-07 02:23:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/743067
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/threewalls/pseuds/threewalls
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><cite>Last night, I dreamt once more that I was drowning...</cite> or "Akame meet in Innsmouth."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story was inspired by H. P. Lovecraft's ["The Shadow Over Innsmouth"](http://www.dagonbytes.com/thelibrary/lovecraft/theshadowoverinnsmouth.htm), and the idea of an "uke" tentacle monster. If you've seen me discussing this on twitter, this is the #takojin story.
> 
> This story has been a long time coming. Written with thanks to Lynndyre for encouragement, Nounou for fetching inspiring things and reassuring me this was "guro" enough, Peri for reminding me that #takojin is adorable, m. for trolling and Mec for proof-reading at the last minute and reassuring me that this had a happy ending.

The clerk behind the general store counter dropped the coins that made up Kamenashi's change onto the smooth, timeworn wood. As he collected them, the unusual fixity of the clerk's stare seemed to seek to drill through his forehead.

"You Kamenashi?" the clerk asked.

He allowed that he was, and the man reached beneath the counter for a piece of cream paper headed TELEGRAM, folded over on itself, Kamenashi's name transliterated into block capitals above the fold. He picked it up, tucking it into the space between the cover and the pages of the journal that had been his reason for this visit to the general store that day. The man behind the counter responded to his smile with the same blank stare that Kamenashi had come to recognise as a distinctive feature of the local population. Their transactions complete, the man turned from the counter without a by-your-leave, or even a nod in Kamenashi's direction, walking back towards the door to a back room from which he'd emerged when Kamenashi had hit the bell set out on the counter for just such purpose. Familiar with such behaviour from other, rare, transactions with the townsfolk, he gave the clerk no more than an absent-minded nod of his own before quitting the store.

He strode across the cobble-stoned semicircular town centre, pausing at the corner before crossing Federal, the spine on which Innsmouth divided. The habit marked him as an native of larger towns, of Boston, and more recently of the university town of Arkham, where automobiles were more likely to be encountered in motion. But more than this, or his clothing, which had been purchased at Kennedy's on a return visit to that larger metropolis only the spring before, Kamenashi was marked as an outsider by the memories of any town dweller, for he had never met a single soul who hailed from Innsmouth before he had stepped from the old bus from Newsburyport less than a fortnight previous. Innsmouth folk kept to themselves, and those he chanced upon that afternoon swiftly averted their eyes from him as they passed. 

He was not surprised to find that the hotel's front door was unlocked. It had been a mansion in an earlier, far more prosperous stage of the town's history. It was now the only building with such a function in town. For only a dollar a night, Kamenashi had a spacious, but sparsely furnished room with an iron-framed bed on the second floor of the building, and for a further twenty cents, breakfast served hot each morning. He set his hat and his coat on the stand by the door and ascended to the first floor parlour which functioned as the hotel's dining room. 

He had stood in the parlour for no more than a few minutes before Moriyama appeared with a tea-tray. She set the tray down upon the table by the room's one, street-facing window. Wiping her hands upon her starched apron, she asked after the state of the injuries on his palms. 

One of two spinsters who managed the hotel alone, Moriyama had confessed as she wrote Kamenashi's name as a lonely entry in the guestbook that they were themselves from up Ipswich way, though the Fukami house had been their home for the past thirty years. The last Fukami scion vanished one night late in the last century, abandoning the property to neglect, ruin and an easy price for two female entrepreneurs. They seemed to enjoy his presence as a guest, garrulous Moriyama cooing over his boyish features and Yamaguchi's quiet, concealed blushes in response to Kamenashi's compliments towards her dress and what she quickly corrected was in fact Moriyama's cooking alone. He had always preferred the company of women more likely to be amused than excited by his conversation.

Over the promised hot breakfasts Kamenashi shared with the proprietresses, he had been warned that the harbour fishermen cared little for curious onlookers who stood in the way of unloading their marine harvest, and of the best path to navigate to the high bluffs overlooking the bay, a pretty if bleak aspect. He had made it a habit to stroll there and back again once a day, to stare down at the cold foam shattering of the waves against the rock. He did not have the routines of his ordinary life. That would have been impossible even in Arkham, but there was a small measure of pleasure in maintaining any routine, any fictive sense of the necessity of his movements through time and space. 

Taking tea in the afternoons was another such habit he had invented to fill out his days in Innsmouth. Moriyama was contented by his cheery grin, giggling as she left Kamenashi to his onigiri and tea. 

The leather of the armchair by his table creaked as he settled into it, and opened his newly purchased journal to the first virginal page. Through the lacy curtains strung across the window, the ghostly outline of the general store was visible across the span of Federal street. 

_Last night, I dreamt once more that I was drowning._

He had written no more than a first line when he sensed noise at the edge of his perception, a voice or perhaps song. Kamenashi glanced about the tea room, but he was very much alone. Replacing the nib of his fountain pen within its lid, he leant towards the window and pulled the lace curtain away from the glass.

She wore white. She had always worn white, stark against the ivory of her skin and her wild dark mane. His hostesses and the rare woman Kamenashi had seen in town all dressed according to fashions earlier of the century, before the War, and could not be discovered with their hair loose and unbound as _she_ did, a tumbled wavy mass that cascaded over her shoulders. Standing across the street on a first floor balcony, she had never seemed to catch sight of him, and thus, was the only woman in the town Kamenashi had yet to encounter who did look away from his gaze.

However, when he touched his mouth with his fingertips, absently tasting skin salt and ink, the woman pressed her teeth into her full lower lip. And for the first time that day, Kamenashi was aware that he had a pulse, that he had a heart, and that it was beating.

He did not know her name. He had never spoken to her, for they had never chanced to meet in the streets or any other venue but this, separated by glass and the street below. She gave no sign that she was aware of his hungry eyes upon her form, but for certain gestures she made that seemed to mirror those of Kamenashi and the fact that she appeared on that balcony each afternoon within the same clock hour that he had first discovered the revelation of her presence.

The woman's face turned suddenly, something from inside drawing her attention away, taking her away. Her gait was delicate, a narrow stride in a woman so tall, and with graceful measure that permitted her to sway a hand towards the street as she turned, a casual, unremarkable gesture that could mean nothing and yet left him with his own hand pressed against glass.

He wiped the fog of his breath from the window with his handkerchief, setting the lace curtain precisely back into place. His tea was completely cold, with an aftertaste that the spinsters had apologised for unasked, the unavoidable result of the unique mineral content of the local water supply. Familiarity had inured him to the taste, which seemed today to compliment the three flavours of rice ball Moriyama had brought with the tea, each a different type of local ocean seafood. 

Distracting himself from the further glances through the lace curtain, Kamenashi took up the thick paper of the telegram, smoothing its unfolded creases. It had arrived through the circuitous route of his mother having written to his last known Arkham address after his landlady, a childhood friend of his mother's, had shipped his effects to his parents as directed. Nakahara had not been privy to his further plans, but Kamenashi had forgotten that Tanaka had once introduced himself to Nakahara, as he struggled under the weight of Kamenashi's inebriated body in the stairwell of Nakahara-san's Arkham boarding house. Tanaka had been the only friend Kamenashi had informed of his planned retreat, a single phone call given in answer to a promise made on a North Station platform as he had waited to board a train whose fact of guaranteed motion was more important than its destination. 

The form of a telegram enforced a structure on his mother's hysterical grievances. "COME HOME KAZUYA STOP" the telegram stated. "FOR THE LOVE OF GOD AVOID--" Kamenashi was surprised that she had heard of the declining town he had selected at random from along the Arkham-Newsburyport line. The telegram was dated received three days before. It had been only chance that he had visited the general store that day. He tore the telegram into inch-wide strips and then inch-wide squares, dropping the pile like confetti into the low banked flames within fire grate, where they burned and were ash within moments. 

Taking up his pen, he returning to writing: _I was awoken this morning standing on the hotel landing, with splinters lodged into the palms of each of my hands from apparently seeking to unbolt window shutters that had been nailed shut. I apologised most profusely to my hostesses for disturbing their rest in the manner in which I did, and allowed them to tend to my injuries. At the time, it seemed but a continuation of the nightmare for as they plucked the splinters from my hands, I could still hear the ringing in my ears of the siren's song..._


	2. Chapter 2

The salt-weathered planks of the boardwalk stretched across the tops of ancient stone blocked breakers, above a rind of dark sodden sand too narrow to qualify with the name of "beach". At high-tide, all would be drowned. Kamenashi's last memory was of settling in his rented bed, of awaiting sleep, and of the dreams that came. 

Kamenashi read the hour of midnight on the face of his pocket-watch, and felt reassured that he stood awake. A university acquaintance reading psychotheraphy had once informed him that the dreaming could read no letters, nor numbers, for it was a different hemisphere of the brain that was the province of waking literacy and numeracy and another entirely of dreams. His conviction was given further weight by the chilling light rain that dampened Kamenashi's hair and clothes. For he discovered with this sensible awakening that he had not travelled through the town as naked as he was wont to sleep, but fully dressed, vest and jacket buttoned and a square of cambric folded in the pocket. 

At a glance, the harbour was deserted. The night winds blew across the water, salting and tossing back the rain as it fell. He caught a flash of white from the corner of his eye, spinning to face the end of the breakwater just in time to hear the splash. 

Kamenashi stripped as he ran, biting his lip against the stabbing agony in his knee. His jacket fell behind him onto the breakwater, boots unlaced at the edge. There. Bright under the merciless light of the full moon, there was a shape in the water, the slow swirl of white fabric and a cloud of dark hair. 

He pressed his palms together in a mockery of prayer, the clap cracking like a lightning strike above the boom of the waves. His body entered the water like a diving bird, slim and poised, and suddenly he was not in the night, but in the murk, body at the mercy of the roiling waves.

Kamenashi could not remember a time before he had had a fear of drowning. As a child, he had struggled to tell his mother of the dream that haunted him, struggled with a child's imperfect language and then with the worry on his mother's face. Swimming was not a skill that his schools offered. In the summer when other children ran to the river, bathing costumes were a luxury beyond a household with four growing boys. 

Convinced that if drowning was to be his destiny, he would meet it fully prepared, Kamenashi had sat in the bath with his knees and feet hanging out, seeking to discover if he might hold his breath but a little longer -- and then a little longer, and a little longer. But the water was too warm, the bath too small and filled with the many and sundry echoes of channelled and domesticated water; once caught, he was never again allowed to bathe without the watchful gaze of a brother or his father.

Attending MU on a baseball scholarship, Kamenashi's blood had run hot in the company of so many fine upstanding young men. As he tossed in bed adrift with fevered imaginings that could have no consummation, the dreams came again, a nightmare like an old friend. He dreamt once more of hanging suspended in space that cocooned and caressed him, the moon a distant dissolving surface shimmer, growing fainter and fainter as he was swallowed into a darkness so cold it burned. Kamenashi had joined the swim team, wringing any desire that remained in his body after baseball practice through endless laps and drills.

Against the shock of such sudden bitter black cold, technique failed Kamenashi, courage failed and tenacity; his muscles locked, his teeth grit, his eyes clenched, as if his very body knew that this course could only be folly, the full force of Kamenashi's determination weighted like a grain of sand against the inhuman vastness of Ocean.

And yet he forced his eyes open in brine burning darkness, forced his legs to kick, turning and tumbling in three dimensions to seek a light, any light. One, far distant could only be the rippling surface, the other, falling in slow motion was Kamenashi's destination. Drown he might, but as Kamenashi had decided in those early dreams, this would not be the place nor the hour. 

For once, Luck was on Kamenashi's side, luck that a women's skirts retarded the rate at which she sank, luck that Kamenashi had somehow endeavoured to follow her song to its source at this moment of her greatest need. He did not know her, but she had called and he would answer, stretching arms around her body to grip. Kamenashi did not allow himself to think of how his siren's body hung limp in his embrace, as he struggled to kick to them both upwards, in the direction his gut told him there would be air and light and life, untrusting of blackness that shadowed the periphery of his vision. Drown he might, but not yet.

Time moved as it does in dreams, a moment stretching to eternity, as if there was nothing else and could be nothing else but black and cold and burning-- and then their heads broke the surface, and time was suddenly thirty moments at once: Kamenashi gasping, swallowing sea water, spitting, his hands fisted in the fabric of her shift, and miracle of miracles, the body in his arms jerked into life. Alive and in his arms, dark eyes rimmed by long, dark lashes scanning the far shore, she was the most beautiful thing Kamenashi had ever seen.

"You shouldn't be here," the siren said, Kamenashi's woman in white, the woman from the general store balcony. "Seriously, what are you-- how can you be--?"

He kissed her. 

Kamenashi kissed her as he had daydreamt of doing, all those afternoons in the hotel's first floor parlour. The lips he traced with the tip of his tongue were cold, lips that opened with such a slow and sober sweetness for him, which asked him no more questions, speaking only sighs. 

He raised a hand, intending to cup the sweet curve of her cheek, but no sooner had his fingers touched her neck, did the woman give a piercing cry, the body that had been so pliant in Kamenashi's grip now rigid and struggling. He released her instantly, kicking to free his legs from the swirling snarl of her skirts as he shouted apologies over the splashing of their bodies.

He saw her lips move, but either his ears could not hear or his mind could not parse what her words might be, but her hand found his wrist, a begging grip-- and Kamenashi returned to merely treading water, now merely holding her hands, keeping an arm's span between their chests.

"Don't go," was what she said, her speaking voice rougher than Kamenashi had imagined, pitched now an octave below the song that had drawn him from his bed.

"I apologise for my forwardness..." 

She shook her head, wet locks trembling with the movement. "You startled me," she said, raising one pale hand before the tempting bow of her clavicle even as she lowered her eyes to the dark waters lapping between their bodies. "My neck is-- sensitive."

So the hesitance in her kisses told of her innocence rather indifference, and yet she was no schoolgirl in the first flower of her youth. Kamenashi would have guessed that she was his contemporary, though perhaps he was the nearer to thirty. How such a beautiful creature had yet evaded matrimony's shackles seemed another mystery, but the irregular texture of her neck that Kamenashi had felt through even so brief a touch told as eloquently of her disappointed hopes as the desperate midnight swim that he had interrupted. 

Kamenashi could not imagine denying her anything she wished of him, of his hands, or his mouth, or his body. He had not felt so enthralled by another's beauty since the first prickings of desire in his youth. Even now, the hand that held hers stroked the delicate skin of her inner wrist. His eyes beheld the contrast of her long dark hair upon pale shoulders-- 

A wave rose up from behind Kamenashi, crashing over them. Even as they both spit sea water, he thought her lovely. Kamenashi rebuked himself for his ungentlemanly lack of self-control, for feeling with the ardour of his blood and not thinking with the clarity of his mind. 

His siren could swim. That much was certain, for she had not pulled him under, had not panicked as the wave briefly submerged them once more. He hoped she was a strong swimmer; with a neck so sensitive, there was no hope of him attempting to swim holding her in some form of lifeguard's embrace. 

"Before another wave drowns us, Miss, may I escort you to shore?"


	3. Chapter 3

Kamenashi reached the shore thinking of a warm bed, the warmer for being shared by the siren he had saved from a watery grave, and dry clothing, or perhaps only the tender exploration of skin being towelled dry. 

They were lucky. His siren had jumped towards the seaward side of breakwater, where the water was indeed deep. However, after stroking around the point of the breakwater, Kamenashi discovered almost immediately that sand had silted the harbour to a shallow incline all along the enclosed edge. When his feet touched bottom, stirring sand as they sunk into the sodden surface, his legs gave way, the shock, the cold, the terror of nearly drowning catching up with him. It was easier to continue swimming to shore even as the water shallowed, to rely on the failing strength of four limbs instead of merely two. 

Kamenashi dragged his body inch by inch from the embrace of the water onto the narrow strip of sand. In touching distance of the rough-hewn stone of the breakwater, he rolled his tired body to sitting, leaning back against the stone, lungs gasping in relief. 

Only then did he look towards the water, scanning the thin strip of beach for his midnight companion. She had followed his lead ably in the water, her clearly competent if uncorrected version of a breast-stroke changing to a scramble at a similar time to his, when the waves first ground Kamenashi's knees into the sand.

He saw her on her own knees at the water-line, dark hair slick against her skull, and her eyes, staring into her dark eyes was like staring up into the immense cloak of the night sky, hints of emotion like the glimmer of distant stars-- or perhaps he had misjudged the direction. In the abyss, too, darkness could be yet so complete, so all encompassing and alluring that a man knew not in which direction he fell. The siren no longer sang, but her gaze held Kamenashi as securely as though he was bound in chains of lead.

The waves crashed around them, foaming and gone, booming with the weight of water against the shore.

In an instant, she was upon him. In the water, in his arms, she had weighed nothing. With her body astride his hips, she had a solidity that made him hunger to explore.

Kamenashi recognised now what he had known instinctively in the water. The shock was not the shock of knowing, but of naming, but of admitting that his siren was no mermaid. The sheer white cotton of the siren's shift stuck like a second paler skin, concealing nothing of broad shoulders, dark, wide areoles, and a slim waist that sat perfectly between the span of Kamenashi's hands. 

"You have--"

"Don't look," the siren said. "Don't look, don't look!" But it was an impossible task for one so slight to wriggle blocking Kamenashi's sight of their legs and also to struggle to untangle the swollen leather of his belt. With a pout, the former objective was surrendered to better achieve the latter.

In the water, Kamenashi had felt them, his rational mind choosing to believe that his legs caught in the tangle of the tattered hem of the siren's pale shift. The translucent fabric could not hide them, ivory the exact tone of the long-fingered hands that had stilled beneath the touch of Kamenashi's hand, ivory banded with a darkness that travelled beneath the translucent fabric, as dark as the siren's sea-saturated locks where they spilt out over Kamenashi's ankles; the arms glistened in the moonlight, tensing, writhing, suckers opening and closing like a thousand tiny mouths.

"Let me touch you," the siren begged. "I have hands like your women, and a mouth..."

A mouth that had tasted of sea water, but also of that queer familiar metallic aftertaste that reminded Kamenashi of his daily afternoon tea. It took all Kamenashi's self-control not to reach forward and drink from those lips once more. 

"Please," Kamenashi said. "My name is Kamenashi Kazuya. Tell me yours."

"Jin. Akanishi Jin. Look, I don't know how long we--" 

His siren swayed forward to speak, voice lowering with proximity to a carefully pitched whisper that Kamenashi interrupted with another kiss, and another. Akanishi. Jin. Now, they had been introduced.

"Yes," Kamenashi gasped when they parted. 

"Yes?" the beautiful creature echoed, long lashes blinking. 

"Yes, I want your hands and your mouth--"

Akanishi's hands jerked in Kamenashi's grasp, but he held fast, allowing Akanishi no freedom of those more human limbs. He felt Akanishi's weight upon his legs shift, the uncanny, uneven press of those limbs that neither Akanishi's shift nor the shadows of his own body succeeded in concealing from view. Those chiaroscuro coils strayed coy at the hem of the limp garment, tugging the damp fabric to tuck over their bulging form. Glancing up, Kamenashi caught the quick twist of Akanishi's face, eyes averted to the sand. 

Even in the bright moonlight that washed all monochrome, Kamenashi could see a flush that tinted Akanishi's face. Perhaps what he was witness to was less innocence than inexperience, his companion flushed with every pretty thing imagined over long years alone. The thought that their bodies would be equally unknown to each other aroused Kamenashi yet further. 

He turned those hands over in his grasp, stroking with the flat of his thumbs over the delicate, dark-veined inner bend of each captive wrist. A protest died unspoken within Akanishi's pale throat.

"You want me to...?" 

"--and all your other parts," Kamenashi affirmed.

Akanishi's dark eyes fluttered closed, eyebrows tipping up. Beyond Kamenashi's sight, he began to feel cool coils of rubbery flesh teased between the soaking wool of his trousers and of his socks, pressure that crept above the elastic of his sock-garters to seek chilled flesh. Kamenashi's body shuddered full-length, an instinctive shiver passing from ear-tip to toe at the first cold-burning touch of tentacle on his bare, yearning skin. 

"Yes," Kamenashi whispered, taking Akanishi's mouth with his own once more.

"Give me a thousand kisses," Kamenashi commanded, the words of the old Latin elegy slipping easily from memory to his lips. A child of Innsmouth might not have had the classics rapped into his brain as Kamenashi had by repetition and the cane, but Akanishi understood the literal meaning of the words, stretching out yet more tentative caresses with a desire for Kamenashi's confirmation or denial for each touch struck as plain as the expression on Akanishi's face. 

And their touch! Their touch was pressure and pin-pricks, not one mouth but a hundred, a thousand, nibbling mouths rolling against his ankles, against his calves, kisses with a sharpness that was so fleeting through the linen of his shirt sleeves that they made him giddy with want. Akanishi's strokes were dulled across Kamenashi's shoulder by the thicker fabric of his vest, and sharp like razors as they stretched within the open collar of his shirt. 

Impatient, Kamenashi released the strength of his grip on Akanishi's human-seeming limbs, placing them to grip Kamenashi's shoulders, freeing his own arms to enfold Akanishi, embracing so fully and completely that a moonbeam could scarcely press between them. Charting the broad expanse of Akanishi's back with his palms was a pleasure both familiar and thoroughly novel for Kamenashi, for no man had been or could ever be like Akanishi, whose touch was heady and hesitant, demanding and yet demure.

"A hundred more... yes, another... thousand... and another hundred..." Kamenashi's litany was broken by his groans and Akanishi's softer gasps, sounds that Kamenashi swallowed and chased back into the soft, wet cavern of Akanishi's mouth. The tentacles seemed as sensitive as fingertips, as sensitive as lips, sliding wet and slick over Kamenashi's skin. Each caress left a trail of lingering coolness in its wake. 

Kamenashi's hands found firm, flat muscle gave way to muscle that was no less firm, but curved, masses moving beyond his sight, churning, restless, beneath the stretched, sodden white cotton of Akanishi's shift. He could feel no boning, no bucklam, no heavy seams. If his fingertips did not betray him, Akanishi wore a shift and naught else, not a corset, not starched underthings or more delicate items of ribbon and lace. If Akanishi had worn blouse and skirt, Kamenashi's fingers would have long since found the waistband and slipped within it to find Akanishi's flesh. 

Akanishi's eyes had remained closed, long, dark lashes shading pale cheeks, concentration reflected in the moue of Akanishi's soft lips. Kamenashi had only two limbs in motion, ten fingers plucking up the fabric of Akanishi's shift; Akanishi's were infinite, more infinite than Kamenashi's mind could distinguish. Ripples of sensation tensed and loosened, shocks of pleasure as tentacles stroked his ankles, counted his ribs-- as still others fumbled open the buttons of his union suit, one line of chill nips descending the line of his belly, each sucker's bite a sting of ice-cold fire, as another line curved behind his neck, a lithe tendril dragging on his haircut grown long. 

Unanchored, the curling, winking tip of a tentacle swayed in front of Kamenashi's face, mesmerising in its motion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nounou drew a picture of [Jin](http://korilakkame.tumblr.com/post/46843633648/takojin-to-accompany-cold-and-intimate-by) from this story... months ago. It's gorgeous.


	4. Chapter 4

In the moment that Kamenashi's chilled fingers finally discovered the hem of Akanishi's shift, the tentacle tip slapped across Kamenashi's cheek, startling in its weight and its chill and the sound, a sound that echoed ringing in Kamenashi's ears, long after the sound itself should have been overtaken by the constant soft push and pull of waves over the sand. 

His arms around Akanishi, Kamenashi plunged his hands deep into the yearning flesh of Akanishi's lower body, the ribbons of slippery flesh that fit so perfectly into the vee of his palms. He licked his lips, the outstretched tip of his tongue catching the thick, rich flavour that Akanishi had left upon his face. Akanishi's slime tasted of marine brine, but not only of ocean. 

"I--"

Akanishi's eyes were wide and dark, shocked open into stock-stillness at this double boldness. All the encompassing weight of his limbs held still but for a slight trembling. Kamenashi had never wanted anyone so, man or maid, in all his life. "I want you on your back," he said--

\-- and in an instant, it was so. 

Kamenashi watched Akanishi's body stretch out upon the damp sand. Tentacles split from beneath Akanishi's shift like foam, tiny curls and mouths and teeth that gripped the hem and raised inch by indecorous inch, unveiling limbs that grew fatter and fatter still, thicker organs of banded light and dark, whose writhing in coils, whose beauty drew Kamenashi on his knees into their midst. 

They coiled about his arms, biting sharp kisses through the ruined fabric of his clothes. They stroked the length of his thighs. They wound behind his back, an inexorable embrace even as they spread before him, the virginal white shift rucked up high above such wantonly splayed limbs.

And there, in the centre of the mass of shivering movement, a small ring of muscle, an aperture, caught the moonlight.

"There?" Kamenashi asked, finding his answer not in Akanishi's words, for his siren did not speak but turned away with a betraying blush, the colour of bruising, of a girl unexpectedly all alone on a beach at night. The answer came in the hesitant unfurling of tiny tentacles, like fronds, like fingers, that ringed the aperture, binding back the quivering masses and stretching firm the muscle that surrounded that soft, secret place within.

One stroked deeper than the rest, and Akanishi's body arched like a wave. Receding, that tentacle was wet, was glistening with yet more of the thick, rich slime that coated all of Akanishi's invertebrate limbs. It grew thicker as it delved within, plunging back and back with a fatness that was more than the slim width of a finger. Akanishi shook like a storm-tossed bark, and Kamenashi had no more gentlemanly patience. He fell upon Akanishi like a drowning man, like a man beyond reason. Akanishi's body accepted him like the sea.

Kamenashi's thrusts were short and sharp, all the wild grace of instinct and none of the artifice of games of love. It was not like the casual couplings of his college bed, now this desperate drive to burrow within another's body with his prick, his tongue and his teeth.

The dark salt of Akanishi's blood was a shock on Kamenashi's lips, in his mouth. He tried to still, to stop, but only anchored his hands more deeply into the wet sand. Strong arms wound about his torso, strong limbs binding Kamenashi ever closer to the creature beneath him. They pressed chest to chest, the slickness between them outwelling from that place where their bodies joined, the rhythm of their hips as inexorable as the tide.

"I watched you," Kamenashi confessed, shaking with the cold and his need. "For so many afternoons, as you stood on that balcony. I watched you and I wanted you."

Kamenashi found Akanishi's mouth once more, those soft, cold lips, and licked at the split he had made there in his ardour. "Since I first saw you," he said. "I have wanted you."

"I dreamt of you," his siren returned. "You do not know how long I have waited." Kamenashi felt Akanishi's fingertips dip beneath his shirt collar, nails cutting into the flesh of Kamenashi's neck, urging him to bend, to seal their mouths once more.

Akanishi's breath tasted of Ocean, of the deep and secret places she hid from the sight of men. Kamenashi felt the secure grip of tentacles binding his body to Akanishi, winding around his thighs and his arms and his chest. He felt Akanishi's slim fingers anchor in his hair. 

All Kamenashi could see was Akanishi's face, like the pale moon shivering on the surface of the blackest water. He could not stop driving himself against Akanishi. Akanishi's eyes were so dark. There was no air. He could not stop their kiss. Kamenashi felt light-headed, giddy, desperate. He sunk his hands deeper, deeper into the sand. 

He saw Akanishi's face illuminated, shining and pale, in one stretching moment of light. Kame's spending hit him like a blow to his body, every muscle seizing with the force of it, from his clenched jaw to the splayed arch of his feet. 

When the thunder came, it sounded like the trumpets of the end. It had begun to rain.

Kamenashi found his bones liquefied, his own few limbs forgotten to his control and gravity dropping him against his paramour as the cage of Akanishi's limbs unwound. With the cold night air rushing back between Kamenashi's numb lips, Akanishi's body was suddenly colour, shades of grey and brown and beige instead of black and flickers of light. Akanishi's lips seemed as dark as Akanishi's eyes, all soft, all sated. 

But the heavens had opened upon them, water falling not as droplets but a deluge, of a second drenching, a drowning upon land. Kamenashi struggled to stand, his feet, his hands, finding only ungainly purchase in the sand. His hand found Akanishi's hand for the taking, but neither his mouth nor his mind had yet returned to form sensible thought. With a tug from Akanishi, Kamenashi allowed himself to be dragged up to a deep stone flight of steps that led up to the boardwalk from the beach.

The nearest shelter was the doorway of some building along the boardwalk. They stood with barely an elbow's spread of distance between them, the doorway providing only shallow respite from the rain and none at all from the thundering of water striking the roof shingles or the boom of the thunder of the sky or of the surf. Akanishi's hand was cold in Kamenashi's grip, a tight grip that Kamenashi could feel slipping as time passed. He could feel the weight of Akanishi's eyes upon him as he looked out into the rain-pelted darkness of the harbour, and did not know what he wished to say.

The woman in white had come to feature regularly in Kamenashi's fantasies in the loneliness and grief that had descended upon him since the Privateers staff doctor had confirmed that his knee might heal well enough for the limp to be imperceptible to the untrained observer, but not for National League base-sprinting. Kamenashi was too young to coach, too inexperienced to manage. He had left MU to take up a position on the Privateers with his degree still incomplete. 

He realised now that he could not take this woman in white to his hotel. He could not introduce her to the proprietresses over breakfast. He could not take her back to Arkham to be the last thing he saw every evening before being claimed by sleep. Kamenashi had no job to return to in Arkham. All his grand fantasies of rescuing a maiden from an overly traditional family who kept her under the lock and key had washed away for what they truly were.

And yet, even with the wet, the cold and the creeping and distinct rotten and rusting scent of a fish refinery, Kamenashi wanted her again. He released Akanishi's hand, his fingers forming fists to keep from throwing Akanishi against the wooden planks of the building that sheltered them. Kamenashi had nothing to offer Akanishi but tonight. 

Akanishi slid slim white hands down over cotton that was transparent as water, stretching the garment perhaps in some vain hope to cover all that Kamenashi had seen. Kamenashi sought to busy himself with his own clothes, cold, slick hands clumsy with his buttons, the basest parts of his body mocking his resolve.

Despite the boom and trickle of noise, Kamenashi caught the wet rustle of Akanishi turning for the storm. 

"Please," he began, but could not dare give words to more. He could not raise his head under Akanishi's steady dark gaze. The deluge had made a dark curtain of Akanishi's hair, the weight of water smoothing any waves or curls. Kamenashi pressed his fingernails into the fleshy parts of his palms. He bit his own lip to keep from his ache to kiss.

"Go, then," Akanishi said, and Kamenashi felt his heart squeezed, a rush of deadborn promises sour up his throat. "My brothers will miss me soon. You shouldn't be here." 

Running into the rain was like diving back into the sea, wind and water assaulting Kamenashi on all sides, the uneven, slick cobblestones sliding under his socked feet. At the first bend, he looked back, but through the storm, it was impossible to judge whether Akanishi was still standing in that doorway or not.


	5. Chapter 5

Kamenashi awoke in a soft bed, with soft light streaming between blue brocade curtains that dressed a window whose unfamiliarity threw him completely. He felt overly warm, stretched within his own skin, and as he struggled under the weight of the blankets piled high over his body, he discovered that his wrists and his ankles were bound securely to the four corners of the bed. The bedroom was empty of any other souls, but he could hear the faint sounds of a city, of more automobiles passing in ten minutes than Innsmouth's Federal Street saw in the course of a day.

Kamenashi called out; his voice was weak, his throat rough. Struggling with his bonds was an exercise in futility. His wrists and ankles were already raw with abrasions, but that pain was both sharp and minor. When Kamenashi ceased for the moment, he became aware once more of a diffuse ache that spread instantly throughout his entire body, an ache deep in his muscles, in his organs, in his bones. He tugged against the bonds again, the rasp of rough rope giving a welcome focus to his mind. He bled and shouted at the white-painted ceiling of the room.

He heard footsteps from outside the door, a nearer door opening, and then that of the bedroom. A well-dressed man burst through the door, and this person was at least someone Kamenashi recognised.

"Kame," he exclaimed, his arms thrown wide-- "Thank God, Kame, do you know who you--"

Kamenashi gave his name, his full name, staring incredulously at his college friend.

"Do you know who I am?"

"Tanaka Koki-- Koki, where am I?"

Kamenashi's first question was soon followed by the second, a third, and many others jumbled over his tongue. Tanaka would not hear of Kamenashi's attempts to threaten him for information. Kamenashi, he said, was a recovering invalid, and needed rest, calm and peace, not agitation physical or emotional in order to heal.

He poured Kamenashi a glass of water from a carafe on a side table, and set it by the carafe. He would not unbind Kamenashi's hands while his mood remained excited. The doctor, Tanaka insisted, had prescribed rest and lots of it.

Kamenashi laid his head back into the soft pillows of the bed. He bit the inside of his cheek, tasting blood, as he waited for Tanaka to pull up a chair beside his sick bed.

"You're in Arkham," Tanaka said in opening. "We're in the Grand on West Pickman."

"Arkham?"

"Kame, today is the fifteenth of November," Tanaka said. He laid his hand on Kamenashi's arm, and it took all of Kamenashi's self-control not to shake like a dog.

Kamenashi had been discovered by the women who ran the hotel in which he had been staying on the morning after a storm the like that Innsmouth had not seen since the summer of 1916 had swept in from the Atlantic, bucketing and buffeting the town. On unbarring the hotel's front door in the morning, they had discovered Kamenashi on the front steps, drenched through and quite unconscious, with injuries to his hands and arms, bruises and splinters driven deep into the flesh of his palms.

Tanaka had brought him back to Arkham post haste, intending for Kamenashi to be installed in St. Mary's, but apparently the initial reports of Kamenashi's injuries were much the product of the hysterical minds of the two spinsters who had discovered him. The Arkham doctor who examined Kamenashi found no such queer animal bites or scratches upon his body as they had reported, but only a weakness of condition easily attributable to the storm.

Kamenashi's condition had not been described as a true coma, but what the doctors had called an enduring dream state. Loud noises, needles, cold water: none of the traditional methods of waking a person had proven effective, and so he was ordered bed rest, warmth and whatever fluids he could be encouraged to swallow without drowning in his sleep.

Kamenashi had been unconscious for the better part of a fortnight, Tanaka related. He had been lucky, indeed, in his old friend's opinion that his mother had frighted on receiving Kamenashi's personal effects in so many packing crates. She had wired Tanaka a sum of money that was frightening in size to allow him to follow Kamenashi with as much speed as possible, and it was luck herself, indeed, that his coach arrived on just the afternoon on the day which Kamenashi had taken ill. 

Tanaka opined that he was much relieved to see Kamenashi responsive once more, with the nightmares behind him, or so Tanaka hoped. The drowning dreams had never become so dire before, had they? Tanaka looked embarrassed, and Kamenashi could not think how to ask what he had said in his dreams.

Tanaka finally offered up the water glass carefully tilted to Kamenashi's lips. The water tasted wrong.

\---

Five days later, Kamenashi was deemed sufficiently recovered from his ordeal that he would be allowed to leave his sick bed. Five days of enforced rest had left Kamenashi increasingly enervated and snappish. Where once he would have enjoyed the decadent privilege of bathing in a claw-footed creamy ceramic bath, he could barely endure Tanaka's attention, even mitigated by the privacy afforded by Tanaka's newspaper. For later, he had not even that, when Tanaka insisted that he could not allow Kamenashi to borrow his straight-edged razor, but that he would be much obliged if Kamenashi would permit him to shave his friend. 

Freshly shaved and dressed for the first time in as many days in a proper suit of clothes, Kamenashi almost felt like his time in Innsmouth had been but a dream. Akanishi, his siren in white, had been a constant companion in his delusions and hallucinations, his fevered brain evoking the presence of the other attending to Kamenashi on his sick bed. Surely, it could have only been so.

Strolling the streets of Arkham, Kamenashi was struck by how dissimilar they were to that of Innsmouth. Here was not the high ton of Boston that he had been accustomed to let pass as a boy, but the fashions were not that of the previous century and the number of pedestrians and motor vehicles seemed fast and startling, and yet, Kamenashi thought, he had lived in Arkham four years, and had only been absent a matter of weeks. Kamenashi breathed in the fresh air, the scent of horse apples and diesel fumes from the mechanical conveyances of the city streets. Four streets from the river and he could not even smell it.

Their promenade was circular in design, Kamenashi found, when Tanaka's guiding steps soon led them back to the Grand Hotel, bell hops at the ready in gold and vermillion to escort upstairs the luggage of other guests. Tanaka was most solicitous of Kamenashi's comfort, of his recently impaired physical condition. When Kamenashi suggested that he felt well enough for further travels, Tanaka asked after the state of his knee.

Kamenashi was more successful in persuading Tanaka to allow him to take breakfast in the hotel dining room instead of returning immediately to the rooms. Suddenly ravenous, Kamenashi perused the menu with an enthusiasm that was brought short by his failure to be moved by the dishes outlined on the page. He settled for kippers on toast and a coffee, hoping that the bitterness of the drink would allow him to drink it without thinking about the taste. 

Tanaka ordered a full spread. As Kamenashi picked at his kippers, Tanaka regaled him with accounting of the lives of their mutual acquaintances, that Taguchi eloped to New Jersey with his girlfriend of long standing, that Ueda's wife had delivered safely of a baby boy. Nakamaru recently successfully defended his thesis in October, and would be appointed to the government office he had longed wished to occupy. He would be in Boston when Kamenashi was well enough to travel there, ready to receive him at the apartment the government had provided for him.

"Have you ever made love to someone whom you could not marry?" Kamenashi interrupted.

"Many times, my friend, and I will not concede having paid for the company of a single woman." Tanaka's cautious demeanour vanished for more animated candour. "Kame, I did not expect it to be a woman at the centre of your black mood."

Tanaka leant closer over their breakfast dishes, cajoling with the friendliest interest, but Kamenashi would not be drawn. He did not know how to speak of Akanishi, as if she were another of the girls Tanaka had brought to his attention over the years of their friendship. He did not know how to speak of Akanishi even to himself, to describe what he had seen and what he had done. Kamenashi sipped at his coffee, letting the liquid only barely brush his lips.

They embraced warmly before parting in the vestibule of the Grand, for Tanaka had an appointment across town. He murmured that he was glad, truly glad, that Kamenashi had discovered that there was life after baseball, after all. Kamenashi waved through the glass doors, watching Tanaka flag a taxicab and ride away. He felt only slightly guilty that Tanaka would have some fast talking to do when he arrived at his destination and found his wallet misplaced.


	6. Chapter 6

With the sun at the zenith of the sky, the Newsburyport train left the platform with Kamenashi alone in its rear-most second-class carriage. He sat in the far corner of the cabin, his aching shoulders pressing into the unyielding wood of the seat. He wrapped his coat tight about his body, secure against the shivers that had begun to intermittently wrack his form. He felt nausea growing with the movement of the train, the quick sliding motion left and right, left and right, left and right, as the train clattered ever on.

At the first calling point, a gentleman in a suit inserted his head into the cabin, and then his entire person. Tanaka's wallet had not permitted a first class birth, and so Kamenashi was at the mercy of intruders. The other man sat in the corner across from Kamenashi, opening up a briefcase onto the bench of the seats and rifling through the papers and folders within. One folder in particular, he removed and spread the contents over the thin table that jutted out from the cabin's window, as unobservant of the speeding New England scenery hurtling past as Kamenashi himself.

Besides a thick spiral-bound reporter's notebook, the pages much ruffled and the text much abrogated and appended, he laid out a series of photographs. Each captured in stark detail a piece of exquisite and delicate metalwork, some rings, some bracelets, or wide, high pectorals, jewellery of uncanny ornamentation. On first glance, the objects' design looked purely geometric, spirals within spirals, but these resolved under Kamenashi's observation to seem like creatures or parts of creatures, some marine, some mammal, yet others perhaps almost humanoid. But rather than a mishmash of taxidermied patchwork, these creatures' bodies were pure grace and fluidity caught in motion, hauntingly evocative of evolutionary possibilities that Nature had seemed disinclined to pursue. 

Perhaps it was simply that they were each turned for the other man's perusal, and thus, turned at odd angles for Kamenashi's own viewpoint, but the figures in the designs seemed to carry somehow unnatural proportions, perhaps an irregular elongation of the torso, or curious interweavings of the lines that suggested their limbs. 

"Kato Shigeaki," the man introduced himself. He was a local historian, he offered, his raised hand hanging untouched above the photograph strewn table that separated them. He grew rapidly flustered under Kamenashi's unblinking gaze. He was, in fact, a journalist, or rather a writer of dime-store novels, the yellow-pulped paperbacks that changed month by month. A Philadelphia man, he'd come to research something of a local mystery, but had found the people uncannily cold to outsiders. After receiving three letters addressed to the local historical society returned without having been opened, he was intent now on a personal pilgrimage to add to his broadly-sketched conclusions about the origin of the artefacts whose images he had previously collected.

The photographs, he explained, were all artefacts of mysterious provenance that he had discovered through pawnshops and auction houses all along the eastern seaboard, though being a man of thus far little funds, he had not been able to purchase any of them. The metal appeared to be almost entirely yellow gold in composition, but for some as yet unidentified admixed metal that contributed a lightness and durability unknown in the pure bullion.

"I tried to convince them I was researching my own family history, but Kato isn't one of the founding families of Innsmouth. If I'd known then what I know now, I could have claimed I was a Yamashita on my mother's side, or one of the long lost Fukami family, or--"

"Akanishi--?" Kamenashi murmured.

"Yes, indeed, the Akanishi family trace their roots back as far as the-- Say, do you know the family?"

"Only the daughter," Kamenashi said. The figures on the jewellery danced in his mind's eye even with his eyes shut. The pain through his head had spread, throbbing behind his eyes, as if his brain was trying to squeeze out through the sockets. Kamenashi had seen imagery like this before, he was sure, but could not place where.

"The daughter?" Kato leafed noisily through his notebook, and then among the folders of his briefcase, papers rasping against papers, crunching and scrunching. 

"Excuse me," Kamenashi whispered, standing up and staggering out into the train corridor. He stumbled down the carriage, body slamming to the carriage walls, first this side and then that. The shivers had so overtaken his body that the washroom doorknob at first only rattled in his hand, rattled like the glass in the carriage window panes. The taste of his own blood in his mouth soothed Kamenashi, calming him for one further concerted effort to push forward into the single-occupant washroom and to latch himself inside.

He awoke on the floor of the washroom, tiles cool under his face. Kamenashi put his hands on the tiny washroom sink, pulling himself to standing. The silver of the mirror had begun to tarnish, curious whorls and other indistinct shapes seeming to appear in the corner of his eye but vanish the moment he turned his head. For the first time since waking in that Arkham hotel room, Kamenashi felt like himself again. The train's motion began to slow, and the call came down the carriage for Innsmouth.

Kamenashi was the first to leap down to the platform, landing steady on both feet. He glanced down at his wrist, and found his wrist bare. The Innsmouth rail station had been refurbished after the war, complete with an enormous clock face set into a central turret. He watched its giant metal hands grind forward in jerk-like motion; the time struck two.

Kamenashi started to run.

\---

Bank Street joined the town square directly, and all downhill, cobblestones striking Kamenashi's soles through his borrowed boots. He ran across Federal, backing up against the old hotel fence and craning his head to barely catch the planks of the general store balcony. 

"Jin," he cried out. "Akanishi-- Jin, are you there?"

Receiving no answer, no call, no wave, Kamenashi rounded back onto the square. The general store was, as was usual, deserted. Kamenashi vaulted the counter. The far room was only a store room, shelves stacked high and neat with nothing Kamenashi sought. No stairs. The ceiling was planked, but solid. Boot catching on the rug, he tugged it back to discover a trapdoor, but its heavy cast iron latch carried an equally heavy lock.

Kamenashi stumbled down the general store steps, screaming his pleas, begging Akanishi to call down to him. Some instinctive sense told him that Akanishi was here, some place tantalisingly close by. 

"Kamenashi, isn't it?"

It was the clerk from the general store and two others, a dwarf and giant, that Kamenashi thought that he had perhaps encountered in passing in the course of his previous stay. The giant crackled his knuckles, a grating sound in the silence of the streets. It was only then that Kamenashi realised that the entire square, never a hive of activity, was completely deserted.

"We thought we had missed you," the clerk said. "We would like you to please come with us, Kamenashi-san."

"Where are you keeping Akanishi?"

The clerk only repeated what he had said before, no expression in his dead eyes. He did not look like Akanishi, Kamenashi thought, nor did either of the other two, but somehow, he knew that these local boys were among those about which Akanishi had warned him.

Kamenashi ran for the centre of the town square, thinking of the bridge, but twisting mid-stride to skip backwards a few paces as he ran, straining his eyes at the general store balcony. He thought he caught a glimpse of white in the distance, but that was when they caught him.

Kamenashi was quick on his feet, but the shorter man of the two was quicker, and the giant socked like his fists were made by bricks. The clerk from the general store only watched, impassive, his arms folded across his chest as he waited for Kamenashi to fall. He did not wait for long.

As he lay there on the street, numb to the cobblestones under his body, Kamenashi curled onto his side, trying in vain to protect himself from the steel-capped toes of the giant and the dwarf, the sound of their laughter in between Kamenashi's own groans of pain. It hurt to breathe, and there was blood in his eyes. 

Kamenashi's last thought was of Akanishi.


	7. Chapter 7

Kamenashi had awoken in the semi-darkness of a room whose floors and walls he soon ascertained were bare rock. He found no windows, nor light of any kind, and the only break in his cell's unremitting stone façade was a series of rusting metal bars, set fast into the floor and into a ceiling higher than he could reach, bolted at one end by a padlock the size of his fist. The only noise besides his own breathing was the uneven drip of water. The room smelt of aquatic decay.

Kamenashi moved cautiously for the beating, but found that their hits must have been lucky, for his body was not as stiff as he should have guessed. He pulled at the bars, but the rust only flaked away on his palms. He ran at them, giving his shoulder against the ancient metal. He thudded his body against them, pain flaring bright and brief and then he settled himself to try once more. He did not panic. He stood even closer to Akanishi in this place, and he would find her soon.

A bar fell, clanging echoing in the dark, but there were no footsteps that followed. Kamenashi squeezed his body through the gap he had made, sucking in his lungs and holding his breath until he was quite light-headed, his chest and back scraped by the bars either side. He found an opening in rock, a path, and so he followed it, groping forward with his right hand always on the damp rock. The bitter salt smell growing ever stronger as he advanced, urging him forward.

He heard the chanting before he discovered the cavern, an unholy harmony in several parts sung in a language Kamenashi could not speak but nonetheless something inside him seemed to know the meaning, as if he had heard this song before in some vanished and unremembered dream. 

The cavern was a larger one, walls invisible outside the inner circle of lantern light, yellow puddles by each man's feet. Kamenashi could see that they wore robes of some dark, voluminous fabric. Each man's face was covered by a deep hood, leaving only their hands visible, heavy rings gleaming in the low light. Each man's attention was caught in the steps of what seemed to be some arcane ritual, each turn and gesture in time with his brothers prescribed by the weight of time and tradition. 

Kamenashi had found only one exit from his prison cell, and that one path through the rock had led him here. He placed his bruised back at the rim of the room and began to follow its edge, creeping crabwise with his eyes watchful on the esoteric mystery being performed before him. 

He passed an eternity in that room, in that slow, sideways shuffle. The chanting repeated; the movements repeated. There was nothing in the world beyond those puddles of smoky yellow light, he found himself thinking, only darkness and quiet and an unbearable aching nothingness stretching out into infinity.

Kamenashi nearly fell backwards when the rock behind his shoulders unexpectedly gave way. This gap was no path, not for a man instead of a fish. Where the cavern wall had broken away was a pool of fathomless darkness smelling of the salt of the sea and the men she drowned. 

Behind him, the chanting had stopped.

"Thank you, Kamenashi," the blank-faced clerk said. "You have saved us the trouble of retrieving the sacrifice."

He held a knife, flat-bladed and ceremonial, the long blade ending in a turned back point. The instrument was forged of some dark metal, some unknown alloy that seemed to eat the very light. His rings were golden, and their filigree designs somehow hauntingly familiar. The chanting had stopped, but Kamenashi could still hear those unearthly sounds, as if they had through their ritual inscribed them on his very brain.

Suddenly, the clerk's two goons held Kamenashi in place. Their hoods turned down, he could now see the horrific scarring at their necks.

"Outsiders cannot leave," the clerk said as he approached, the wicked edge of the knife turned high. He, too, carried a choker of scar tissue like a ribbon around his neck. "You cannot leave. You know too much."

"I have a prior claim," a voice called from across the cavern. 

Akanishi stepped into the light, breathless and so very beautiful. Kamenashi struggled, but the goons held him fast.

"Jin, he can't leave."

"Leave?" Akanishi asked, and as Kamenashi watched the words form on Akanishi's lips he only wanted to be tasting them. "He came back for me, Pi. Didn't you, stranger? You want to stay with me."

Akanishi smiled, and Kamenashi's body ached with the cruel distance between their bodies. Akanishi smiled, and there were words once more waiting to be said.

Perched on Akanishi's raven tresses was a tiara of the same lustrous metal, the same uncanny figurines as the photographs that that novelist had showed Kamenashi on the train. With a sudden flash of insight, Kamenashi recalled where he had seen jewellery of that sort before. He could recall vividly a past summer when he had been ten years old. The heat had kept him drowsy but awake long past his bedtime and he had gone creeping in the hallway of his family's small apartment. Through the crack of the kitchen door left ajar, he heard his father and his mother arguing as was common then, about money. 

His father had begged his mother to be allowed to sell a bracelet that lay on the kitchen tablecloth, huge and gaudy, with patterns on its face like the patterns Kamenashi saw behind his eyelids when he shut his eyes tight to plunge his whole body beneath the surface of his bath. Kamenashi's mother had insisted that the bracelet was an heirloom, his mother's mother's, a relic of the grandmother that Kamenashi had never met. He had once thought it odd that his mother had all his childhood claimed to hail from Arkham, but had greeted his MU scholarship with a pallor and a faint.

"Stay?" The words were slippery in Kamenashi's mouth, clumsy as if he were drunk. "In Innsmouth?"

The shorter man laughed, pulling Kamenashi's elbow further back. "She means in the water."

It was then that Kamenashi realised where he had smelt what he smelt in this room before, on the beach, their antelucan revels and his exploration of Akanishi's secret places. Some animal within him, some throwback to an earlier, simpler era, locked the muscles of Kamenashi's legs in terror at what it now knew lay beneath the waves.

"Will you stay with me?" Akanishi asked, and Kamenashi could only drop his head. 

Akanishi smiled, and stepped forward. Akanishi's lips were as soft and as cold as Kamenashi remembered, so cold that their touch numbed him. When Akanishi stepped away, Kamenashi could not feel his face.

The clerk handed the knife to Akanishi, and with trade-rough hands, the two goons arched Kamenashi's body back over the dark and endless deep, baring the vulnerable column of his neck. If Kamenashi would be staying, then Akanishi explained, he would need to cut through Kamenashi's throat to allow him to breathe.

Akanishi raised the knife, and Kamenashi could not turn away. He could not even close his eyes. "I'm so glad you came back to me," Akanishi cooed.

Kamenashi could not feel his face, or his arms or his legs, but he could feel the knife cutting through his flesh, the pressure though not the pain of it. He could feel the blood dripping down to his collarbones and sliding down his throat. Akanishi's cuts were caresses, curving the blades alternately against each side of Kamenashi's throat, thin parallel slices and deep.

Kamenashi could not speak. His mouth was drooling, and he could taste his own blood on his breath. Akanishi smiled, Kamenashi's blood gleaming on Akanishi's lips, his siren's pretty lithe tongue licking clean the blade. The goons released Kamenashi and the water hit his back.

Kamenashi could not swim. The paralysis from Akanishi's kiss extended to the four corners of his body, and so he sank, unmoving, salt water rushing into his open mouth. In the silence and the darkness, Kamenashi sank. 

He felt something touch him, hands grab him, and he knew it was Akanishi, human fingers unpicking the buttons of Kamenashi's borrowed suit, Akanishi's coils shredding the water-soaked fabric of his trousers and his shirt.

Kamenashi realised that he could move, and he could breathe. His lungs were as full of salt water as his clothes, but Kamenashi felt his strength returning. He reached to thread his fingers through the wild fronds of Akanishi's hair.

\---

Now Nature was not the force that moved brine through Kamenashi, through the hesitant fluttering of his newly grown gills, sliding salty over his palate to mix into Akanishi's mouth as they kissed. They kissed with open mouths, wet within and without, Akanishi's fingers at his waist, and Akanishi's _arms_ curling around Kamenashi's legs with their sucking grip. The weight of water pressed them down, down, into the darkness and the deep.

Kamenashi felt another grip upon his ankle, far thicker than those of which he had felt before. Akanishi's lips still pressed enduringly against his own, but he seemed to hear a voice speaking nonetheless. 

Akanishi called the voice "Papa."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can also comment at my [LJ](http://threewalls.livejournal.com/363442.html) or my [DW](http://threewalls.dreamwidth.org/226347.html) if you prefer.


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